The Creative Act

Chris Schasse
Film 202:605
10/2/08

Paper #1: The Creative Act
Bear Garden

After watching the film for the second time (and even after the first time) I get the impression that someone has died. Someone died and the lingering sense of darkness and mourning are still there. The kind of mourning that comes without crying or any kind of release. The stale darkness that stays with me, almost demonic, but a demonic force that does not captivate me completely. Like the calm before the storm, or the calm after it. Almost the feeling that I’m about to be attacked, but for now I am safe. Or maybe the attack has already been made, and the enemy has withdrawn.

This film, in my mind, plays with time. I don’t know if something is about to happen or if it already has. So while watching it I am stuck in the middle, unable to decipher what the present is. Maybe the film is trying to get the point across that time is a cycle, and that the past and the future don’t exist, and all there is is the present.

In these two paragraphs I have attempted to do what is talked about in the Marcel Duchamp quote. I (the spectator) have attempted to interpret this film’s inner qualifications to add to the contribution of the work. I realized through the process of taking notes that this film is really just meant to be experienced, and not to be analyzed into too deeply. The actual images and symbols and music and sounds do not have much meaning by themselves or in relation to each other, except as a whole experience. As the viewer experiences this film, the film puts them in a trance, much like the feeling of meditation; the feeling of Zen. It makes the viewer question the inner parts of his or her mind, and not what the actual film means or is trying to get across. It makes the viewer conscious.

Andrea does an excellent job creating something extremely abstract and yet, at the same time, mixing lots of tangible sounds and images, giving the viewer the impression that they are ‘looking through’ something. She does this by the use of people in the background and overlaying images and manipulating the actual film through scratches or whatever else. An image of a man’s face appears a couple of times throughout the film, a face which is hard to decipher. It creates a gap, making the viewer have to fill in who the man is, and why he is there. The voices in the background also contribute to this gap. What is the source of the voices? What are they saying?

She uses color very well. At one point the sound of a siren is heard, and a series of red images were shown with the sounds of war in the background. At another point an inverted image of a church (at least I perceived it to be a church) came onto the screen , and after that everything was blue and dark, and she intermixed sounds of the water, and the whole experience felt very spiritual (this is the point when I had the greatest sense that someone had died).

The first scene in this film invites the viewer right away to question what is happening. As the camera goes through the yellow garden of flowers, there are voices which are hard to decipher in the background. It makes the viewer wonder what’s happening, and from the start of the film the viewer is questioning and trying to fill in the gaps. This scene gave the viewer a feeling of suspense, like something was going to happen soon. After this scene, it goes to images that give the viewer the impression that they are behind something. Everything in this next sequence is not tangible, but at the same time there is a strong light that looks like the sun in the background in relatively the same place. This image of the sun grounds the viewer in something, making him or her feel buried in this mess of scratches and non-tangible images. It makes the viewer feel lost in a sense, wanting to get out into the light and grab hold of the sun.

Andrea also sprinkles in many images of people in the background. These people, I feel, also ground the viewer in something. There are many other images of windows and of rooms, all very similar, all making the viewer wonder about the connection between them. It makes the viewer question “What is the significance of this room? Who are these people in the distance? “ The viewer, again, has to fill in the gaps that the maker (Andrea) put in there.

This movie is by far my favorite that I’ve seen in class. A lot of the films we’ve seen seem to me much more like an experiment. Like What the Water Said, Mothlight, and Suspension. These films are very interesting as experiments, and have very interesting results, but I don’t feel like there is much emotion in them. I am left thinking “that’s pretty cool.” But with Bear Garden I really felt like there was a story to it, chalked full of strong emotion. She did a good job of really rooting me in something tangible, even though the film was in many ways just as abstract as the others.